1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of data management. In particular, the present invention relates to a method for the definition of data categories that uses logic templates. Such a method may be used in database processing. The present invention also relates to a computer program product and a user interface for achieving this method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In many businesses and organizations, there is a requirement to maintain time and labor data. For example, time spent on a particular project, including overtime, may need to be recorded, together with vacation hours. Often this time and labor data needs to be managed in a coherent manner across many different operational areas, such as human resources, payroll and project management. To facilitate this data management, a centralized time recording user interface may be provided, for example as a web application.
When dealing with such data in a centralized system, there is the problem of adequately providing the data categories needed for efficient processing of the time and labor data. As many modern systems need to aggregate data from a wide variety of sources, it is difficult to predetermine all the necessary data categories during application development. Thus there is a need to enable data categories to be easily defined after development.
Within the art, there is also the problem that the definition of data categories is a complex technical process. In the prior art, a user may be first presented with a database containing time and labor data. They will then have to link this data in a particular way in order to generate a required data category. Typically, this involves manually entering a Boolean logic expression. Even when dealing with basic expressions, such an operation may be difficult for experienced data programmers and almost impossible for users with a limited knowledge of logical syntax. Such difficulty also increases with the size and complexity of the time and labor database. Thus, there is also the need to provide a simple way for a user to define a data category.